Same sex marriage heads back to the states

Now that the US Supreme Court has ruled on the Proposition 8 and DOMA cases in ways that were favorable to same-sex marriage but left unresolved the question of whether bans on such marriages were unconstitutional, as expected new cases are being filed at the state level that go to the heart of the matter. About 14 such cases are already in the works with more expected and at least one of these cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court fairly soon. [Read more…]

A disturbing trend in American politics

Once again we are witnessing a debate in the US Senate as to whether the filibuster should be dispensed with. To be quite honest, I cannot get too excited about this kind of rule change, though I can see why abandoning it could have significant consequences. But it is a symptom of a far more serious problem. I think that the US political system has deep problems that extend far beyond arcane senate rules. [Read more…]

Observing Ramadan in the Arctic Circle

I just love it when religions create all these hoops for their followers to jump through and then, whenever one of those rules become inconvenient for whatever reason, struggle to find ways to break the rules while trying to maintain façade of coherence. Jews are clearly the winners in providing the most source of fun because their kosher and Sabbath rules are unbelievably complex while their Talmudic scholars are ingenious about finding loopholes for them, as was the case with telephones, ovens, elevators, and escalators. [Read more…]

“They call me Ms. Hamilton!”

[UPDATE: Please see comment #7 by Holly Wesley, daughter of the late Mary Hamilton.]

There are some film scenes that are not only indelibly etched in one’s personal memory but become part of the collective memory of an entire generation. One such scene is this one with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, with Poitier as a police detective from Philadelphia who gets involved, alongside Steiger as the local sheriff, in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi and has to deal with the racism he encounters.
[Read more…]

Edward Snowden to seek asylum in Russia now, Latin America later

It looks like Edward Snowden has decided to create international pressure against the US government’s attempts to block his travel. Although he has offers of political asylum from three Latin American countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua), the determination of the US government to get its hands on him, and the willingness of its client states in western Europe to assist it in doing so, present major difficulties for him to get there. This article by the McClatchy news service discusses the hurdles in his path. [Read more…]

Using the no-fly list as a weapon of coercion

The Los Angeles Times published a grim tale of someone who got trapped in the Kafkaesque world occupied by those on the infamous ‘no fly list’.

For two weeks, Rehan Motiwala, a 29-year-old medical student from Pomona, sat stranded at the Bangkok airport, sleeping for 10 nights on a roach-infested mattress in a dank, windowless detention room reserved for deportees. [Read more…]

The latest Snowden revelations

The Guardian reveals how software companies secretly gave access to the NSA to their customers’ information. What is revealed includes things such as:

  • Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
  • The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
  • The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
  • Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
  • In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
  • Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a “team sport”. [Read more…]